Londoners enjoy the healthiest diets in Britain — spending less on cakes, biscuits and sweets and more on fruit and vegetables than any other part of the country.

Families in the capital also devote the smallest percentage of their shopping budgets to alcohol and cigarettes, new official figures reveal.

However, Londoners spend far more on going out to eat and staying in hotels than other region, and also have to allocate much bigger chunks of household spending to the high cost of housing, public transport, communications and education.

The insight into lifestyles around the country came from the Office for National Statistics today, in its annual family spending survey.

Although London families’ weekly food supermarket bills were the biggest in cash terms at £57.90, as a proportion of household budgets they were the lowest at 10.1 per cent.

Only 0.9 per cent of spending goes on “buns, cakes, biscuits etc” the lowest percentage in England.

The most enthusiastic cake and biscuit lovers are found in the North East, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and the South West.

London is also the only region in England where less than 100 grams of sweets and chocolate are consumed per person each week — only half the level of the North East.

Londoners come closest to hitting their “five a day” target with 1,188 grams of vegetables and 1,337 grams of fruit eaten weekly per person.

The most veg-phobic English region is the North West, while fruit is least likely to appear in the weekly shop in the North East.

Government statisticians said that the findings appear to back up the recent claim by health minister Anna Soubry that children from poorer backgrounds are more likely to be overweight.

According to the ONS survey: “Regions that contained households with lower incomes spent less on fresh produce such as fruit and vegetables and spent more on less healthy foods such as cakes, buns and biscuits, when compared with other English regions.

“The opposite is true for regions with households that had higher incomes such as London, where households spent more on fresh fruit and vegetables.”

Average household spending on tobacco and on alcohol to be drunk at home was just 1.8 per cent of the total spend in London but 3.4 per cent in Northern Ireland.

Spending on clothes and shoes was surprisingly low in London at just over the national average of 4.5 per cent.

It was found to be highest in some of the poorest regions — headed by Northern Ireland, the North West and the North East.

Spending on public transport was highest in London but spending on cars was lowest. Londoners also made the fewest journeys per person per year by car or public transport — just 841 compared with 1,028 in the South West.

Not surprisingly housing costs eat up the highest proportion of family budgets in London at 15.9 per cent, compared with a national average of 12.8 per cent.